1
Juliet
“LET’S GO TO THE CEMETERY,” they said.
“It’ll be fun,” they said.
Well, I was calf-high in mud, traipsing right into the heart of vampire territory, and I wasn’t having fun. I wasn’t having any fun at all. None. Zilch. Zip. Zero. When the Vampire Lord of Darkvale told me that he was requiring my presence, I was scared and a little pissed. Nobody wants to hear they’ve been summoned by a monster, least of all me, but it’s not exactly a request you can refuse, is it?
I worked at the primary hospital in Darkvale, and my job was providing blood to vampires. We accepted donations of all kinds and we accepted buyers of all kinds, but there was a teensy-weensy problem that we’d been having lately.
Someone got hungry.
Well, hungry or impatient.
A couple of rogue vampires had been killing humans and sucking them dry before they had a chance to donate blood, which meant that our supply of fresh blood was severely limited. Oh, we still had a lot of people who donated, but vampires weren’t exactly known for not being godless beasts with endless appetites.
They were.
Vampires were ready to eat one hundred percent of the time, and my job was to make sure that food was available. Now, it wasn’t. This had led vampires to get kind of hungry and it had increased crime throughout the city.
Was that what the vampire wanted to talk to me about?
Did he think it was my fault somehow?
I was supposed to go head-to-head with the biggest, baddest
vampire in town, and I was supposed to explain why his own personal order of blood was inadvertently chopped in half. He wasn’t known for being patient and he didn’t have a reputation for kindness. I’d worked in the hospital for years, but I didn’t exactly interact with vampire lords on a regular basis.
So, that was...cool.
I walked a little faster, trying to pick up the pace as I moved. It was hard because of the mud. That, coupled with the fact that I really didn’t want to be there, made moving pretty difficult. When I finally reached the center of the cemetery and found myself face-to-face with the biggest mausoleum of the place, I took a deep breath.
This was it.
This was the place where Colin, asshole of the vampires, was supposed to meet me. Why we weren’t meeting in his huge mansion on top of the hill, I didn’t know. All I knew was that this was where I’d been told to come, so this was where I’d come. I stood, awkwardly looking around. It was dark out. The moon was out, sure, but it wasn’t exactly bright enough to see perfectly clearly. There were still shadows dancing on tombstones and the fact that I was outside of a fucking mausoleum didn’t exactly calm my racing heart.
“Hello?” I finally said into the darkness. I glanced at my pocket watch. It had been a gift from my brother before he passed away. Everyone else in the world had phones or regular watches to check the time on, but I carried this ancient relic because it reminded me of everyone and everything I’d lost. It was important to remind yourself of the people you had lost. It kept you human, in my opinion.
“Why, hello.”
The voice came from inside the mausoleum. I turned to see that the door had opened and sure enough, Colin was standing there. Even in the darkness, he was an intimidating figure. He was tall, for one thing. The dickhead rarely wore a shirt, for another. He seemed to think that leather pants coupled with an open trench coat was clothing enough for a vampire, and who knew? He might have been right. I wouldn’t know because Colin wasn’t exactly my type.
I didn’t date dead guys.
I definitely didn’t date ones who acted like him.
“Look,” I said. “I’ve got the order forms with me. I still maintain that the error wasn’t my fault; however, we’ve come up with a couple of possible solutions.”
Colin said nothing. Instead, he took the three steps down to the dirt ground outside of the mausoleum, and he reached his hand out. I was holding the order forms in my hands, and I was shaking just a little. Ignoring my obvious discomfort, he reached out, grabbed the order forms, and tossed them to the ground.
“You made a mistake,” he said. “Fix it.”
“Excuse me?” I snapped, suddenly irritated. “You called me out here in the middle of the damn night when normal humans are sleeping. Normal people aren’t just hanging out in cemeteries looking for trouble with vampires, yet here I am: looking for trouble, apparently.”
“I ordered twice as much blood as usual for a specific reason. It’s good customer service to double check with a client before canceling half of their order.”
“And it’s good business to actually include a note when your order is a completely random number,” I said. I knew he was right. I knew I should have double checked before I “corrected” his order, but I hadn’t. Things had the hospital had been wild and busy lately. Everyone was on edge because of the recent hunting. It had led to lower amounts of blood at the hospital and it had led to poorer relations between humans and vampires.
For years, we’d been working to find ways to live in peace. We’d managed to come up with a system where humans could live in vampire-protected towns, but they would be expected to give blood on a regular basis. That blood would be put into a blood bank, essentially, and distributed to the vamps throughout town. In addition to getting nutrients from things like pigs and cows, vampires would have access to fresh human blood to keep their strength up.
I might have been human, but even I understood what would happen if the vampires who guarded our town were to die off or become sick. There were plenty of communities outside of the walls that protected our city that were also full of vampires. Those communities didn’t have the same protections that our city did. Some cities were completely overrun with vampires. Some of them didn’t have a policy where humans had to donate blood. Instead, vampires would catch a human and essentially feed from them for months or even years until the human died. Sometimes, if a vampire was too rough with its human, the person would die in a few days or even a few hours.
Bodies had started turning up around town that reflected just that sort of attitude. It was a horrible thing, and we were all scared and afraid that our city was going to become ravaged by vampires. Perhaps that was the real reason I’d canceled Colin’s over-the-top order. I’d known that we couldn’t afford something like that. A year ago, there had been a major attack on our city. We’d recovered, mostly, but we still didn’t know who was responsible. Ever since then, people had been tense. The last couple of weeks, though, had been especially awkward.
Vampires could sense when trouble was coming.
I didn’t really understand why.
I just knew that they could.
“I think you’re forgetting who you’re talking to,” Colin said.
“And I think you’re forgetting that I practically run the entire hospital,” I countered. “I do everything. It’s not exactly something a vampire like you would understand.”
“A vampire like me?” He asked. He stood up a little straighter, towering over me. “A vampire like me?”
“Yeah,” I hissed. “A vamp like you.”
Before I knew what was happening, his hand was on my throat, and he had pressed me up against the stone sides of the building he’d come out of. My feet were dangling off the ground, and I reached up, pawing at his hand as he tightened his grip on my throat.
“For a human, you have the shittiest manners I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Someone needs to teach you a lesson.”
“Fuck you,” I managed to spit out.